"I don't think people should risk their lives to do it on monsters that are obviously not going to be able to survive because they're made of smoke or something, but I think it's a good use of resources on the margin and I have gear for it since I'm personally well equipped to do it."

"Would you be interested in doing a lightning talk on orphan monsters later?"

"What exactly is a lightning talk?"

"Five minute presentation with time for questions afterwards."

"I don't have anything prepared but I can probably just... talk generally about orphan monsters for that long if you like."

"That should work," says the other Lucien, adding Haru to the queue.

"Happy to help."

Next up is Lucien explaining how his divining power works.

The other Lucien doesn't interrupt but is really quick any the questions.

"So can you get like, number of espers that work on the average dungeon in Toronto? Or uh, something more complicated like the average number of hostages in the dungeons with seven or more espers?

"Between 2 and 3 and uh, more than a hundred less than a thousand - I shouldn't get more specific unless we have a lunch break real soon."

"People are terrible at record keeping about dungeons and it's terrible and I want to spend the next week fixing that with your power."

"Sounds like a great use of time and calories to me."

"You will be an incredible boon to the field, I should go over my old blog posts and see if there's any particularly high value mysteries."

"I'm regretting not taking notes every time I looked for a statistic on Wikipedia or Google and couldn't find it."

Lucien is very pleased with his power decisions.

"If there's a way his power doesn't work now that would make it more useful, tell him, he can grow it any which way even while I'm still stuck trying to get ahold of my brother."

Lucien is excited enough about the power that he won't quibble with the way that's framed.

Next up is a primer on how dungeons work! 

And then mages.

And then.... Lucien has already done esper powers and so it's time for whatever explanation of guiding Lucien can give without feeling awkwardly like he's talking about his sex life and wow it turns out that's really difficult when Haru is right there.

"Do you want me to explain this for you?"

"...Yes perhaps that would go better."

"Guiding - etymology is disputed - is how we cure backlash. It works by skin contact and fluid exchange between compatible espers; it's possible skin contact works by fluid exchange, sweat and skin oil, but that's a live scientific debate. I lean against because some pairs are so compatible as to notice without having to physically touch, I can feel Lucien and also my previous partner June from a few paces. Unidirectional fluid transfer like a blood donation guides the recipient, not the donor. Guiding per se is universally reported as a pleasant sensory experience in and of itself, though some backlashes can interfere with the presence of other people or contact therewith being tolerable. Compatibility appears to work by way of the two espers' backlashes being opposite - for example, my backlash makes me lonely, and June's makes her socially reclusive, which is one of those inconvenient ones that interferes with guiding being tolerable, while Lucien's makes him self-centered, both of which are conceptually opposed to loneliness. I'm also tolerably compatible with a guy in Vancouver whose backlash makes him averse to sound and light. Backlashes themselves are in their own ways opposed to an esper's powers, which lets you guess better than chance about two espers whose powers you know even if their backlash is secret; you can also often get decent results by trying a partner's partner, or a partner's partner's partner - they haven't tried it but I bet Lucien and June are more than zero compatible.

"Sometimes compatibility is asymmetrical, where one person reports much more intense guiding than the other, and we don't know what causes that - 'oppositeness' per se shouldn't have that trait. The better the compatibility and the more contact and/or exchange, the faster backlash drops. Compatibility remains discernible when there's no backlash to guide away. In theory even espers who feel completely incompatible to one another will make non-zero improvements on each other's backlashes but in practice this is so unpleasant and inefficient that it doesn't come up in the modern day and our data about it is from the seventies when nobody knew any better."

"How treatable are backlashes without guiding?"

"Not. After some hours - variable esper to esper - acute symptoms settle into 'chronic' backlash. Pain, impaired organ function, fatigue, sometimes nausea, usually some attenuated form of the individual acute symptoms. You can also get conversion to chronic backlash by accumulating a ton of backlash too fast. But the amount of backlash will not go down at all ever without guiding, it'll just settle into the more generic form and hang out increasing all-cause mortality risk."